Hello my friends,

I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport ready to head back to Wisconsin.

Please forgive any early morning typos.

I have to tell you that Wisconsin is looking pretty good to me right now.

As many of you know, I have been at Webmaster World's Pub Con for an
entire week in Las Vegas (Casino Land) Nevada.

http://www.pubcon.com

Pub Con stands for "Publishers Conference".

Rather than send you random technology snippets during the conference I
decided to go for a long walk and really think about what I want to say to
you abut what is happening in the SEO and Internet universe.

The best way to do that is to give you only the highlights, and as the
overwhelming amount of technical information passes through my "mental and
emotional filters" I figure an edited overview will be more useful to you.
I will gradual submerge you in the subtle details over the next several
months.

Suffice it to say, where the internet is going is very clear to me- as
well as what it means to your business.

Highlights and �quick rants�:

Quick Rant:

There is a TON happening but nothing is really going on.

What do I mean by that?

Two words: social networking.

Social networking and social network sites are supposed to be a huge deal.
Very few conference speakers connected social networking to appropriate
vertical market silo planning and long term business strategy. I was both
disturbed and delighted to see this.

As Brett Tabke, the founder of PubCon ranted about the extremely poor
keyword and theme tagging of online audios and videos: "I feel as if we
are back in 1999 when it took two weeks to own your niche completely."

I agree.

In fact I was blown away by the common "band-aid" approach to viral and
social networking discussed by some of the conference speakers.

Social networking for the sake of social networking is probably a waste of
your time. In other words, really think twice before sitting around all day
signing up for the various social networking sites (I will list all of
these for you inside the Theme Zoom members area later) without knowing
what the heck you are doing. Be sure to have a decent plan! Don�t submit
crazy (novelty) link baiting articles and videos to Digg.com just in order
to get inbound links until you really know what you are doing. In fact, I
would not bother using that method at all.

Useful Tip:

Ways to use social networking media intelligently.

My conversation with Rick Klau of Google content Acquisition was
excellent. He wanted to remind everyone that not all XML feeds come from
blogs- and that if you are going to involve yourself in social networks
there are ways to optimize and enhance such activities intelligently.
(More intelligently than most people understand).

Huge Hint 1:

For example, if you have a face book account, there is an option to import
an XML feed directly into your facebook account.

Google purchased http://www.feedburner.com for a reason!

Feeds are soon to removed completely from Google SERPS results.

Get a feed folks.

Don't hunt and peck publish your "Brand You" articles and ideas folks. Get
a feed.

If you podcast, run a feed.

If you video cast (more about this later because it is a HUGE topic),  run
a feed.

Huge Hint 2:

If you are podcasting and video casting- TRANSCRIBE some or ALL of your
material folks.

You will dominate if you tag your media even a LITTLE, because nobody is
doing it. This is because many people believe that transcription is cost
prohibitive.

Which is why I was happy to meet Stephen Baker of http://www.everyzing.com
who was part of the technology that brought "voice-to-text" transcription
services (with a 97 percent accuracy, folks) to the CIA where it is being
used in Virginia to this day.

I cannot tell you more than this, except to say . . . this technology
(Voice-to-text-video-to-text) is alive and well and being used to increase
traffic up to 900% for some websites.

http://www.boston.com is an example.

The video and SEO tag-snippets on this site are created by a machine guys.

Huge Tip 3:

I am watching the "voice-to-text" and "video-to-text" industry extremely
closely, folks. I now have some inside contacts and dialogues going that
are extremely interesting and beneficial to all of my members.

Would you like to get a free little taste of FUNCTIONAL voice-to-text
technology being used?

Go to http://www.jott.com/register/ and register.

Essentially this allows you to leave yourself voice messages that are
transcribed (very effectively) into written text. You can send your text
message to multiple cell phones at the same time. For free.

Huge Tip 4:

You know those monthly charges you pay for �mass video upload� services
like "Traffic Geyser"?

This service allows you to upload a video to several video social
networking sites with the push of a single button. (In theory). I have had
a lot of trouble with the service working and it gets about a 20% upload
rate.

Well.

http://www.tubemogul.com is currently offering almost the same service for
free. The agency version will be a robust platform that blows Internet
Marketing services out of the water. I will call our friends over there
and let them know what is coming, because they will need to prepare
extremely comprehensive "value added" services to the upload technology if
they are to compete with Ajax-Style user interface (and FREE) bulk video
upload platforms.

The Tips above are only scratching the surface.

I will podcast the details of my entire trip upon my return- including my
personal conversation with Matt Cutt�s of Google as well as various other
Yahoo and Google engineers and VPs.

Is hiring an SEO consultant like a Casino?

The problem is that many SEO's are looking for short term techniques like
off-topic link baiting and "silly video" submissions to create social
buzz. They are so worried about providing short term traffic results for
their clients that they forget about multi-channel marketing and vertical
market research that will align topics and themes with the keyword theme
of the inbound links they acquire.

This is absolutely NOT true of all SEOs.

Bruce Clay, Paul Bruemmer and Matt Cutts all meet with my personal
approval.

Both Paul and Bruce mentioned the power of silo architecture, but
surprisingly, there was little mention of "ranking higher with fewer
inbound links as a result of silo-ing . . . until I asked them.

When Queried, after a power-point slide that looked exactly like Bruce
Clay's traditional Silo Architecture, Paul Bruemmer mentioned that he
achieved incredibly high rankings for his client http://www.nasdaq.com by
using these EXACT silo methods, folks.

Yes we are talking about NASDAQ. You know. Wall street. The whole
enchilada.

Bruce Clay, is the original author of the silo-architecture concept that
inspired us to move forward with Theme Zoom as a more automated solution
to the silo planning issue.

While I was on the road, Sue sent me a demo of the new "Visual Interface"
of TZX, the all new Theme Zoom that even a dummy (i.e. ME) can use.

Unfortunately, I am not allowed to show it to you yet.

As always, your friend-

Time to fly.

- Russell Wright

608-432-1387